"We built what they told us to build, why aren't they jumping all over this?"
"I knew that Product Manager didn't know what he was talking about!"
"It's a shame we ran out of money, this app was going to be great!"
“That request isn’t in the spec, that will cost you extra to implement”
"Where's the loyalty? I put in 18 hour days for the last year and where did that
get me?"
Any of these sound familiar?
The common misconception underlying all of these comments is that application
development is about engineering an application. It’s not. Application
development is about providing customer value. Unfortunately, since managing
customer expectations are harder than designing a flexible object library, it
tends to be dismissed by most project teams…much to their detriment.
Over the last ten years, Customer Focus Groups have proven to be a software
development best practice that effectively embraces the customer’s voice into
your project. This presentation will give you an overview of what Customer Focus
Groups are, their origins, benefits, critical success factors, and how to
incorporate them into your projects.
Distilled from the experience of over 50 Customer Focus Group events, we’ll
examine a typical Customer Focus Group project plan, and learn how to plan for
the event, execute the event, and analyze and synthesize the results back into
your project plan.
Lastly, we’ll spend a considerable amount of time discussing how simply
incorporating Customer Focus Groups into your project plan can have profound,
and lasting, effects on the overall dynamics and effectiveness of your
application development efforts.